Where does courage come from?

The Andalusian horse in my barn has courage bred right into her. After all, Caprichosa's ancestors are the Horses of Kings. Her folk carried the conquistadors. She has a heart for battle.

We've ridden together in some pretty tight places up in the mountains. Places that left my head swirling from up there on her strong back as I fought the temptation to grab the saddle horn while the mare simply strolled onward with all the nonchalance of a tourist on one of those holiday bus excursions. You know, where they serve box lunches and Coca-Cola.

The narrow, rocky trail to Lake Katherine that Dennis talked me into years ago--

I'm jiggling the reins every now and then just to remind the horse of the sheer drop off to the canyon way down there below, the one that's filled with boulders so astonishingly humungous that giants must have stacked them there. Their footprints are everywhere. I can hear them breathing.

To let her know that that marauding mountain lion could appear on the naked cliffs above us at almost any moment. And as she and I are slightly more plump than Dennis and his mountain goat arabian horse Miss Morningstar on the trail ahead of us, he'd be sure to eat us first.

The Andalusian horse remains nonplussed.

I pale in comparison.